Antarctica-philes are at odds over the best way to protect the white continent from camera-wielding sightseers

By ELIZABETH FEIZKHAH

t Kelly Tarlton's Antarctic Encounter amusement park in Auckland, New Zealand, visitors pay $10 to glide through an artificial icescape in battery-powered red snowmobiles, passing within 2 m of a colony of king penguins. Inside its Plexiglas walls, the birds' home is as hygienic as an animal enclosure can be. Fresh snow is made on site, air and poolwater are scrupulously filtered, guano is hosed away twice daily. Despite half a million visitors a year, this 1,000-sq.-m Antarctica is perennially pristine.

The real Antarctica, a frozen continent over 50 times larger than New Zealand, may not be quite so well scrubbed. But 180 years after seal hunters became the first humans to set foot there, it remains the world's largest wilderness--what U.S. explorer Admiral Richard Byrd called "the last continent of silence." The vast, creeping ice sheets that have pushed parts of its bedrock 1 km below sea level are so pure that air trapped in them forms a record of climate changes over 200 millennia. Lake Vostok, sealed by ice 2 km thick, may hold life forms that have evolved in isolation for up to a million years. The 1961 Antarctic Treaty, which suspended all territorial claims and dedicated Antarctica to science, called the continent a "pristine laboratory of worldwide significance."

In January, the 26 main parties to the treaty moved to keep it that way, ratifying an Environmental Protocol that sets out guidelines for limiting human impact on Antarctica. Scientific expeditions can be relied on to comply, since the nations that run them are all signatories to the treaty and could lose their say in Antarctic affairs if they flout the rules. But some environmentalists, ecologists and government officials are uneasy about whether the protocol is the most appropriate way to control tourism, which may be run by operators from any nation.

Last southern summer about 10,500 tourists visited Antarctica. Most skirted the coast in ships, using rubber dinghies or helicopters to reach shores where millions of penguins, gulls and seals breed; a handful flew to the interior for camping or climbing adventures. Despite the cost ($5,000 for an eight-day cruise from Chile to the Antarctic Peninsula, $22,000 for a four-hour flight to the South Pole), tourist numbers are growing: by 2003, the International Association of Antarctica Tour Operators (IAATO) expects the annual total to exceed 14,000.

Tiny as such numbers appear in a continent of 14 million sq. km, some environmentalists wish tourists would stick to ersatz Antarcticas. Beth Clark, director of the Washington, D.C.-based Antarctica Project, says some of the 240 green groups she represents "would prefer not having tourism to the continent." Others want it tightly controlled, she says, "until we have a better understanding of exactly what sorts of impacts humans can have on the Antarctic environment." Opponents of tourism say that in a land where nature is violent and unpredictable, life precarious and ice-free habitats few, even the best-intentioned tourists can do unwitting harm: introducing alien plants and microbes, trampling mosses that may take decades to regrow, stressing birds and animals. Although tourists average only 20 hours on land, compared with weeks or months for scientists, they congregate in the scarce ice-free areas that in summer support large wildlife populations. Says Clark: "I've heard of cases where visitors have startled seals on cliffs and the seals have tumbled over backwards and killed themselves." In a decade or so, she adds, "we might turn around and conclude there's really no problem. But as a biologist I have a lot of trouble believing that having so many people going to the same sites over and over would not have an impact."

Stanislaw Rakusa-Suszczewski, a marine biologist who heads Poland's Henryk Arctowski station on wildlife-rich King George island, near the Antarctic Peninsula, says the notion that tourists threaten the environment "is nonsense. These few hundred people, most of them elderly, walking half a kilometer, cannot do any harm to Antarctica. Illegal fishing is much worse for Antarctica than 10,000 tourists a year." Bernard Stonehouse and his colleagues from the University of Cambridge's Scott Polar Research Institute recently completed a seven-year study of tourist impacts at 200 sites. "I challenge anybody to show any place where shipborne tourism has created any damage at all," he says. "We have sites that have now been visited for 30 years, and the penguins, seals and vegetation are still there. On Cuverville island, with 3,000 tourists a year, the number of breeding pairs of penguins increased 15% in the three years we were there. If it had gone down, everyone would have said, It's the tourists."

Tourism at present levels is not only harmless, its defenders say, but a force for good. People who save for years to take up the promises of companies like Radisson Seven Seas Cruises and "experience nature in the most intimate circumstances without impacting fragile ecosystems" insist on getting what they pay for. As a result, says Greg Mortimer, head of Australian-based tour operator Aurora Expeditions, "Tourism operators have a marketing advantage to wave the environmental banner and be sincere about it." Long before the Environmental Protocol was thought of, members of IAATO were asking their clients to observe strict "leave no trace" rules, summed up by British author Jenny Diski in her memoir Skating to Antarctica: "Never take anything, not a stone, not a discarded feather, from any of the landing places. Do not leave anything behind on land. [Do not] get closer than 6 m to any of the animals." Most visitors are eager to comply, says Joyce Jatko, environment officer with the U.S. National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs: "The tourists watch one another. They say, Make sure you don't drop that tissue, and, Of course I won't bring this aboard."

Antarctica's paying visitors have been its most ardent advocates, says Stephen Martin, the Australian author of A History of Antarctica: "For every boatload of tourists who go down, the vast majority come back quite passionate about the place, about the pristine nature of the continent, the wildness, the untameability, the remoteness, the sheer beauty and the vastness of it." That zeal, and horror at the waste dumps and fuel spills that defiled many scientific bases until the 1980s, helped build worldwide support for the Environmental Protocol.

Many conservationists believe the protocol, whose key requirement is that all groups planning operations in Antarctica submit environmental impact assessments to their governments--signals a new era. Now, says Mortimer, "we have to look at the place with environmental sensitivity no matter who is going there." But other observers fear that the document's vague guidelines, which only 11 of the signatory nations have enacted into law, offer no defense against cost-cutting entrepreneurs who could undermine the high standards the tourism industry has set for itself. In any case, says Australian Conservation Foundation spokesman Geoff Mosley, "It's pretty hard to enforce these rules if you don't have policemen."

Even if it could reliably manage what people do in Antarctica, says ecologist Stonehouse, the protocol contains no mechanisms for managing the land itself. "If Antarctica were under any regime other than an international treaty," he says, "we'd be thinking in terms of national parks and recreational reserves, run by nations that accept responsibility for them. The diplomats say, Oh, no, Antarctica is very special and precious and we can't think of it in the same terms as some national park somewhere. But Canadians, Norwegians, Greenlanders, Alaskans all know how to manage recreational reserves in polar areas. In Antarctica we have dozens of precious sites, receiving streams of visitors every year, and not a single management plan for any of them."

Part of the problem is that under the treaty system, no nation legally owns territory on the continent. The situation is very different on tiny, subantarctic Heard and Macquarie islands--both World Heritage areas under Australian sovereignty. Tourists are limited to 500 a year, confined to a few coastal areas, and given pamphlets outlining the restrictions, pinpointing wildlife sites and describing the various species. A levy on tour operators has helped pay for park rangers and, on Macquarie, the construction of boardwalks and lookouts near wildlife breeding grounds.

But if such controls--let alone infrastructure--were ever set up on the continent, says the Antarctica Project's Clark, "It would create quite an uproar" from the environmental community and from the treaty signatories that do not claim territory. "If Australia started acting on their claim," Clark says, "even if they were doing something helpful, you would get a domino effect on other claimant nations that are not as benign in their outlook on the Antarctic."

Poland, which claims no territory in Antarctica, does not try to limit tourist numbers; indeed Arctowski station's policy is never to turn tourists away. Says Rakusa-Suszczewski: "We welcome tourists. We can show them fur seals, elephant seals, Adelie and Antarctic penguins, grasses and herbs, and pools with tiny crustaceans. And we want to show them how we live here." But hosting up to 150 visitors a week can be time-consuming, so the expeditionaries have marked out a mountainside walking trail at a respectful distance from wildlife areas and recently built "a very nice small hut in the style of a Polish mountain hut" to serve as a tourist information center. Clark finds that move unpalatable. "If they have set up a building just for the sake of tourism," she says, "that would be a concern."

But for some nations with interests in Antarctica, such modest attempts to accommodate tourists are of far less concern than the treaty system's inability to prevent unauthorized and unreported visits to the vast continent. (A Czech national, for example, is said to be running adventure tours from a disused base he bought from a former East Bloc country.) Says Australian Parliamentary Secretary for the Antarctic Ian McDonald: "The protocol and the treaty generally have the right approach. But it's a question of not just having rules but making sure they are complied with. Tourism is going to happen whether we want it to or not. We may have to consider whether, if there is going to be tourism, we as a government need to be involved so we can regulate it, rather than just turning our backs and letting it happen."

Though the form such involvement might take is both hazy and hotly disputed, a working party of Australia's Antarctic Science Advisory Committee, whose report on the future of the nation's Antarctic program is before the government, has suggested that one station slated for closure might be converted to a tourist base offering "opportunities such as access to [explorer Douglas] Mawson's hut or trips to the high plateau." This week a conference in Christchurch will examine the idea of setting up a tourism operation at New Zealand's Scott Base, on the Ross Sea. Says author Martin: "If it's properly controlled and regulated, land-based tourism could be a positive step...But I know there is a very strong body of opinion that it is impossible to achieve this so it shouldn't even be thought about." Clark hints that such proposals are unlikely to get past the environmental movement: "We had a Canadian tour operator that was proposing a land-based research-tourism station, and we mobilized enough public opinion and support against it that they backed down."

Most who have visited the icy continent agree that man has a duty to preserve what Tim Higham, spokesman for government agency Antarctica New Zealand, has called "the last place in the world that's not stuffed up." The question is whether, if the treaty system is unable to protect Antarctica, individual nations will be permitted to.

--With Reporting by Simon Robinson /Auckland